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Working with words

Typography

Week 5

This week we put down the letters and glyphs of the last few weeks, took a step back, and started to consider whole words. This was one of those lessons, where you learn proper stuff, like that leading used to be the space between lines, so you’d have 24/12 for example. But now it is the measurement from baseline to baseline, so the same layout would now be 24/36.

The space between words (or ‘wordspacing’ – shocking) should be the width of a lower case ‘i’ of the same font you are using;

Checkioutithisiperfectlyispacedipullquote

Also ‘tracking’ which is the inter-character spacing on a chunk of content – a word, sentence, paragraph etc. I always though this was kerning – I didn’t realise kerning only refers to the adjustment of space between individual letters. Larger tracking should always be applied when using all caps, or if you are reversing light copy out on a dark background, including back-lit signs.

We played a bit of hand-kerning, with some tricky combinations. The rule is, find the trickiest pair of letter to sit together, sort them out and then take that spacing as your lead for the rest.

These were my attempts… the feedback was that the W is too far away and the S too close, but not too bad on the whole apparently. Interesting looking at the letters so closely, and fun to stick them down with glue… no second chances! Or deleting and starting over.